One Hundred Years of Fortitude

CARMEN HERRERA

Carmen Herrera, 99, a regal Giacometti-thin woman with bone-white hair, could be the poster child for late-in-life recognition. Her work will be included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s much-anticipated show this month, inaugurating its new building at the foot of the High Line. There, a painting of hers — the diptych “Blanco y Verde,” 1959 — will hang for the first time alongside works by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns, publicly granting her a status in the canon that — according to curators at several major institutions — should have been hers for years. She will be a centenarian this month. A documentary about her life, “The 100 Years Show,” made its festival premiere in April.

Herrera was born and studied architecture in Havana, Cuba. In 1948, she moved with her husband to Paris, where she exhibited several times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and developed her abstract geometric style. But upon returning in 1954 to New York — then at the height of Abstract Expressionism — she was plunged into obscurity. Although she was friends with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and knew the Ab-Ex artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, her pared-down, purist style — which in many ways anticipated Minimalism — shared little with their larger-than-life gesturalism. Herrera continued to produce work, but her paintings remained stashed in her studio until she was granted a small show at El Museo del Barrio in 1998. During a gallery group show in 2004, Herrera sold her first painting, at the age of 89. Among the collectors who immediately bought her art were Cuban-born Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. The young Cuban-American artist Teresita Fernández calls Herrera “crucially important, both for the focus and singularity of the work and because she inadvertently represents the invisible legacy of the 500 years that Latino artists have been working in America.” She is also now represented in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “It’s about time!” she says over a nip of Scotch in the New York loft that doubles as her studio. “There’s a saying that you wait for the bus and it will come. I waited almost a hundred years!”

Carmen Herrera’s first museum retrospective will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall of 2016.

Living, Breathing Art

AGNES DENES

Agnes Denes is aware that the theoretical underpinnings of her work are esoteric, but she has always tried to sugarcoat the pill. “My work was never really understood,” she says. “It was shown because it was exceptional and beautiful to look at, which is a trick of mine in order to make complex ideas more easily swallowed.” Now 83, and the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Denes is known for works that merge her interests in philosophy, mathematics and science, including intricate diagrams and “map projections” of the planet Earth onto an egg, a hot dog and — a form that has inspired her for decades — a pyramid. But she is most celebrated for “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” 1982, which transformed a barren plot near the former Twin Towers into golden fields of grain. A kind of global gardener, she has made equally ambitious earthworks including “Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule,” 1996, an 11,000-conifer forest in Finland, and “A Forest for Australia,” 1998, 6,000 native saplings planted in the form of five spiraling steps in Melbourne.

Most recently, Denes was commissioned to create “The Living Pyramid” for the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City — her first land-art creation in New York since “Wheatfield.” The 30-foot-tall structure sown with the seeds of several grasses should have started to sprout by mid-May, just in time for the Frieze Art Fair. “I was hoping for a lot of wild flowers,” she says wryly, “but they don’t grow that quickly.”

“The Living Pyramid” is on view at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, through Aug. 30.

Mystic Sense

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

Dorothea Rockburne, 82, has never veered from her singular vision. Her lifelong love affair with mathematics and painting was cemented in the 1950s at North Carolina’s experimental liberal arts school Black Mountain College, where she was a student of the mathematician Max Dehn, famous for his work in the field of topology. But it wasn’t until the mid-’60s that Rockburne realized precisely what she wanted to express in her art. According to the artist, she was in the middle of a dance performance with the Judson Dance Theater when she had the epiphany that would lead to her unique take on geometric abstraction. “I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio,” she recalls. “I was visually solving equations.”

Since then, Rockburne has consistently created paintings and installations that express mathematical concepts, although she hasn’t always wanted to share her work. A solo exhibition in New York in 1958 was both a critical and commercial success, but she herself deemed it “not good enough” and retreated to her studio for almost 10 years. During that decade, Rockburne worked as both a waitress and as the studio manager of her friend Robert Rauschenberg in order to support her young daughter, Christine.

In 1970, with a backlog of unseen work, she joined New York’s legendary Bykert Gallery, which also represented Brice Marden and Chuck Close. She has since had a retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., in 2011 and a solo show of drawings at MoMA in 2013. Still, she feels something is missing. “I would very much like a retrospective in New York City at a major museum,” she says. “It’s time.”

Exploring Art and the Universe Through Geometry

MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

If Iranian culture has sometimes been left out of the history of Modernism, its traditional techniques have proved pivotal to Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 91, whose decorative
works elegantly conflate Persian geometries with Abstract Expressionism. In 1969, Farmanfarmaian created the first of her mirror reliefs, which are again in the vanguard thanks to the resurgent interest in non-Western schools of Modernism.

Born in Qazvin, Iran, the daughter of an Iranian diplomat, Farmanfarmaian briefly studied at Cornell University and Parsons School of Design. She created the famous purple flower logo for Bonwit Teller even before working for the New York department store, and later befriended fellow store employee Andy Warhol. She also produced illustrations for Glamour, commissioned by the artist Alexander Liberman, then editorial director at Condé Nast. She was mentored by the painter Milton Avery and socialized with Joan Mitchell and Alexander Calder. And yet, she insists today, she was invited to places like the Eighth Street Club, a storied salon where the Abstract Expressionists held court, only because she was a “pretty object.” She didn’t take her own work seriously at the time. “I was just doing it because I liked it,” she says. “I did not think: I am a good artist.”

In 1957, she wed the Qajar prince Abol Bashar Farmanfarmaian, moving back to Tehran, where she began the consummate collection of indigenous Turkoman jewelry and pottery and folk-art “coffee-house” paintings that have continued to influence her work. In 1979, her career took a dramatic detour when she and her husband traveled to New York for a holiday visit, the start of what would become a 26-year exile precipitated by the Islamic Revolution. The loss of her studio and the confiscation or destruction of much of her early work — along with her beloved collection — was a setback not only for the artist but for the scholars who lost her early oeuvre. Yet Farmanfarmaian continued to make art. In 2004, by now widowed, she returned to Iran, slowly but deliberately rekindling her career. In 2011, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a champion of her work, edited her first monograph. Of “Lightening for Neda,” her largest installation to date, she told Obrist that she wanted the work’s reflective surface to have a liquefying effect. “Your own picture, your own face, your own clothing,” she said. “If you move, it is a part of the art.”

“Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014” is on view at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through June 3.

On History and Identity

LORRAINE O’GRADY

Midway through her career, at age 45, Lorraine O’Grady changed her profession from rock critic to artist. Born in Boston to West Indian parents, she also worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. government and as a translator before making her art-world entrée in 1980, with the attention-getting invention of a persona, Mlle Bourgeois Noire. Wearing a dress made of 180 white thrift-shop gloves and carrying a whip embellished with white chrysanthemums, she staged guerilla performances, delivering impassioned tirades about race relations at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Just Above Midtown gallery, a space devoted to black avant-garde art.

O’Grady’s 1983 performance “Art Is . . . ” featured a 9-by-15-foot antique-style gold frame mounted on a parade float that traveled up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard during Harlem’s African-American Day Parade, framing passersby and neighborhood sights as it went. O’Grady is also known for her “Miscegenated Family Album,” in which she juxtaposed images of her sister, Devonia Evangeline, who died at 37, with images of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Her iconic 1992 essay, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” is still widely referenced and taught, and her photographic piece, “The First and the Last of the Modernists,” was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Recent exhibitions by Alexander Gray, a gallerist committed to artists identified with the feminist and multicultural concerns of the AIDS era, have brought her work to a wider audience. “I am not being re-recognized,” O’Grady, who is 80, says. “I am in the period of initial recognition.”

An exhibition of Lorraine O’Grady’s work, featuring 48 photographs documenting an autobiographical 1982 performance piece in Central Park, “Rivers, First Draft,” will be on view at Alexander Gray Associates in New York from May 28 through June 27.

Life in Abstract

ETEL ADNAN

Etel Adnan, 90, first received international renown as a painter in her late 80s, when her small but powerful abstract works garnered acclaim at Documenta 13. But the Lebanese-born artist, poet and writer had long been something of a cultural figure in France and the Middle East. Adnan started out as a poet, and in 1949 won a scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied philosophy. She later moved to the United States, studying at Berkeley and Harvard, and in the ’60s began painting, making the first of her trademark accordion books, or “leporellos.” She went on to publish a number of well-regarded volumes of poetry and prose. After returning to Beirut in 1972, she made her name during the civil war there with a novella she wrote in just one month in 1976, “Sitt Marie Rose,” about a Lebanese Christian woman who works with Palestinian refugees and is assassinated. In the late 1970s, Adnan and her life partner, Simone Fattal, moved to Sausalito. It is the landscape of that part of California, particularly Mount Tamalpais, that permeates her vividly hued abstractions.

Now back in Paris, where she has lived since 2012, Adnan is focusing on her writing, including a new book of poems and an opera. In 2014, she received one of France’s highest cultural awards, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and several of her leporellos and abstract landscapes were included in the Whitney Biennial. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of exhibitions at London’s Serpentine Galleries, has called her “one of the most influential artists of the 21st century.” Her advice for young artists? “Do what your inner soul tells you to do, regardless of any money or success it will bring you.”

Our Bodies, Ourselves

JOAN SEMMEL

Joan Semmel has never shied away from the graphic scrutiny of her own naked body — even now, at age 82. In recent paintings, she depicts herself as aging and nude: “As an older person, I want to be respected,” she says. “I want to still feel that I am a vital person. I want to be seen, not disappeared.”

In 1970, Semmel left abstraction for figuration, beginning the first of a series of explicitly sexual works: portraits of copulating couples. By mid-decade, she had switched the focus to herself, painting from photographs of her own nude body. “We all have some difficulty in confronting our aging physical selves,” she says, “so when you are painting yourself in that position, it really means that you have to say, ‘I’m doing this and I’m not going to make it pretty. I’m not going to hide it, disguise it, no face-lifts. It’s going to be really the way I see it.’ This is not a disease that’s happening. It’s the natural evolution of a person.”

Semmel has always been an outspoken feminist. But while she benefited from the support of her peers in the feminist movement, being labeled as a “breakthrough feminist artist,” she says, was also “a kiss of death.” “I think we were punished for being feminists by not being included in any of the mainstream kinds of trends that could have included us,” she says. Even when the ’80s brought about a return to figuration and Expressionism, her work continued to be overlooked by many critics.

Semmel, who is also represented by Alexander Gray, is encouraged by the current interest in her — and other older female artists’ work — because, as she puts it, women “are usually buried after about 45 years of age and just disappear completely.” Moreover, she adds, she isn’t just getting older, she is getting better: “I really feel that some of my most powerful work has come in these late years.”

Pop Art

ROSALYN DREXLER

Rosalyn Drexler, 88, has worn many hats. Born in 1926 and raised in East Harlem and the Bronx, she traveled around the country in the late 1950s as a wrestler: Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, an odd incarnation documented by Warhol in a series of silkscreens, ‘‘Album of a Mat Queen,’’ in 1962. Since then, Drexler has happily digressed. In the 1960s, she became a novelist and an Obie Award-winning playwright. In the ’70s, she wrote for film and television, winning an Emmy for a Lily Tomlin television special. And she adapted the blockbuster film ‘‘Rocky’’ into a novel (under the pseudonym Julia Sorel).

Drexler first emerged onto the art scene in 1960 with a series of sculptures created using plaster and found objects, admired by critics and fellow artists alike. Always interested in a wide range of disciplines, she switched to painting and, by the early ’60s, was well known for her brightly colored, cartoon- and film-noir-inflected paintings. Like fellow Pop Art practitioners Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann, Drexler incorporated images scavenged from the media, especially magazines; her technique was to collage and paint over them, allowing just a hint of the original to show through.

The multiplicity of Drexler’s career has meant that her painting has often taken a backseat. But, she says, ‘‘I never wondered which was more serious. I was always so full of work and happy to be working. I was not thinking about my, quote-unquote, ‘career.’’’

Drexler continues to paint to this day; however, it is her early work that has recently garnered renewed critical consideration, re-establishing Drexler as one of the key figures of Pop Art. ‘‘It’s like a miracle, the attention that’s being paid and the people writing about the work,’’ she says. ‘‘I am finding out more about me than ever before.’’

‘‘International Pop,’’ featuring Drexler’s work, is on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through Aug. 29.

The Erotic Universe of Judith Bernstein

JUDITH BERNSTEIN

Judith Bernstein, 72, has always taken a bold, in-your-face approach to gender politics; indeed, one of her best-known works is a series of enormous, charcoal-drawn, hairy, phallic screws, created in the early to mid-’70s. A self-styled “proto-feminist,” she was a founding member of A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery, established in 1972 to show only women; she had her first solo show there in 1973. But it wasn’t until nearly 40 years later that Bernstein had her first solo exhibition at a major museum — when a 66-foot-long mural of her signature, among other works, commandeered the New Museum’s lobby. In fact, there was a period of nearly a quarter-century when she barely showed at all.
Bernstein was one of only a few women in her painting class at Yale when she joined its M.F.A. program in 1964. She met and befriended playwrights John Guare and Kenneth H. Brown, who happily introduced her to men’s-room graffiti, from which she derived the titles (and themes) of her first important series, graffitiesque anti-Vietnam War paintings emblazoned with various sexual terms.

Her work has always been provocative. “There is a lot of work by men, as well as women, using female genitalia in a romanticized way. My work is the angry manifestation,” she says. “The image I use is very explosive. Women are at the center of the universe and of life — and that is not romantic and passive.”
In 1974, just a year after her first solo show, one of her screw drawings, “Horizontal,” was selected for a major show at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, “Focus: Women’s Work — American Art in 1974,” curated by, among others, Marcia Tucker — and then unceremoniously plucked from the exhibition by the museum’s administrators, despite a petition signed by Louise Bourgeois and John Coplans. In the years that followed, she says, “I was stigmatized by women as well as men.” It wasn’t until 2008 that Bernstein found a champion of sorts in the artist Paul McCarthy, famous for his own outrageous sexual imagery, who first saw her work at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea and went on to help arrange several shows at his daughter’s California gallery, the Box. “I call it a rebirth,” she says of her so-called “rediscovery.” “The biggest perk is that if I do a painting, I can have it shown right away.”

VIDEO: Studio Visit | Judith BernsteinThe feminist artist wakes up with T at her home and studio of 50 years in New York City’s Chinatown on the eve of her solo show.

“Voyeur,” a solo show of recent work at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, runs through June 27.

Quilting the Fabrics of History

FAITH RINGGOLD

Faith Ringgold, 84, learned how to sew as a child from her mother, Willi Posey, a fashion designer. Her early pieces included hooded masks with fabric, beads and raffia; she also made dolls and life-size soft sculpture. Her signature work is her evocative series of “story quilts,” which include both imagery and handwritten text; she made her first of these, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima,” in 1983.

Ringgold is a longtime champion of both women’s rights — she crusaded to get Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud, among the few black women the museum had ever shown, into the Whitney Annual in 1970 — and of her own proud heritage. In the mid- to late ’60s, she made paintings and posters supporting the Civil Rights movement. A show of that seminal work, “American People, Black Light,” was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in November 2013. The artist first published her memoir, “We Flew Over the Bridge,” in 1995. She also writes and illustrates children’s books, which share the colorful, celebratory imagery of her paintings. The winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1992 for “Tar Beach,” Ringgold just published her 16th children’s book, “Harlem Renaissance Party,” which introduces some of that great cultural movement’s key members to young readers.

“If you live long enough and you persist, you are going to get recognition,” Ringgold says today. “You have to stay in the game.” Ringgold has not only stayed in the game, she recently designed one of her own, called “Quiltuduko,” for mobile devices. Inspired by Sudoku, the number game, it uses quilt designs instead of numbers.

Textures and Colors

MICHELLE STUART

Striking and mysterious, Michelle Stuart’s “#28 Moray Hill,” 1974, cascades down a gallery wall at the new Whitney Museum of American Art. The silvery, unfurled scroll — a graphite-and-earth rubbing on muslin-backed rag paper — is a consummate example of Stuart’s unique land-art based work. Unlike most earth artists, Stuart doesn’t directly shape or sow the land itself. Rather, she takes a large-scale imprint of it, a frottage. In a sense, she uses the earth as her drafting tool.

The 82-year-old artist has been creating these ghostly images of the planet since the late 1960s. Among her most famous pieces is “Niagara Gorge Path Relocated,” 1975, in which she first imprinted a nearly 500-foot-long paper scroll with indigenous rocks, then unscrolled it over a cliff — in the spot where Niagara Falls was thousands of years ago.

Stuart, an inveterate traveler, began globetrotting right out of high school. Before moving to New York in the late 1950s, she lived in Mexico City and assisted Diego Rivera; she met her first husband, José Bartoli, a Catalan cartoonist, at 18, and they lived in Paris for four years. In New York, she worked as an illustrator and started making plaster casts of her own body parts. She briefly lived in Atlanta with her second husband, and it was there, in 1969, that she made her first earth-inspired piece, which used red soil from an American Indian site. In the mid-’70s, she helped found the feminist collective and magazine “Heresies.” Stuart’s travels continue to inspire her, and her most recent work consists of photo collages of images from both past and recent trips; she also uses archival material. “It’s the best thing I ever did; I am excited every day,” she says. “You are an amalgam of experience and you can reach in and get what you want. It’s like you are your own source material.” A solo show of this work, “Silent Movies,” ran at Leslie Tonkonow this past winter.

Stuart had a retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in 2013; the first monograph of her work, “Michelle Stuart: Sculptural Objects, Journeys In & Out of the Studio,” was published in 2010. Unlike many artists, she has shown consistently. “I’ve always had recognition,” she says. “But being a woman, I’m not a big star somehow. You reach a certain point and there’s a glass ceiling.” Describing this stage of her career, Stuart paraphrases T.S. Eliot: “I wear my trousers rolled,” she says. “It’s the philosophy of an older person . . . There’s a wonderful freedom in not having to prove anything.”

Stuart’s work is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Sept. 27, at the Hammer Museum until May 31, and at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through June 7.